Published November 20th, 2006
in Opinion and United Nations.
After having just finished writing a post asking for your opinions on the UN, I thought it would be fair for me to expand a bit about what I don’t like about the UN. And the end of the article you’ll find some praise for the United Nations, just to be fair. Here’s what I already wrote earlier:
General Assembly resolutions are, by merit of not being binding, irrelevant. And the Security Council is, due to the veto-system, incapable of making decisions on many touchy subjects. Having to attain a majority of votes is usually such an arduous project that resolutions are watered down to a shadow of their original intentions and often achieve nothing.
Published November 20th, 2006
in Opinion, United Nations and Your Opinion.
While browsing a multitude of political blogs and forums after yesterday’s UN General Assembly resolution on Israel and the subsequent comments of John Bolton, the US Ambassador to the UN, I found that there are some very strong and very different opinions out there on the future of the United States in the UN.
Bolton yesterday -in a slightly roundabout way- suggested that the United Nations might not be “capable of playing a helpful role in the region”, referring to the Middle East, and said that anti-Israel bias is “a decades-old, systematic problem that transcends the whole panoply of the UN organizations and agencies.”
The United Nations General Assembly has overwhelmingly passed a resolution urging an immediate end to all acts of violence by Israelis and Palestinians. (Sources: BBC World and Haaretz).
The resolution calls for an immediate end of Israeli incursions in Gaza and Palestinian rocket fire into Israel. It also calls for an immediate investigation into the recent Beit Hanun shelling, where a few misfired shells killed 19 Palestinians, to be set up by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The investigation is likely to be headed by former US president Jimmy Carter. There is no mention of the Hamas-led abduction of Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit.
Published November 12th, 2006
in Middle East, Israel & Palestine and Opinion.
Many of our friends in Europe and the Arab world would have us believe that Hamas is a modern, respectable party. That they won their landslide victory in the Palestinian elections last January due to their plans to fight corruption and improve health care and education. Our friends continue to say that they are the legally elected governing party of the Palestinians and that the United States and Israel are monsters for not throwing billions of dollars at them.
And so another election draws to a close in the manner we’ve come to expect: the counting of votes dragging on beyond election night with a few thousand votes separating two flawed candidates in a single state. Our electoral system surely works in mysterious ways that on occasion it seems to thrust the future direction of the nation on the shoulders of a handful of voters. Still, after the smoke has cleared, one thing has become obvious: the Democrats have regained control of Capitol Hill.
After 12 years of Republican control it seems like the reins of both Houses of Congress are passing to the Democrats. The Associated Press has called the Senate race in Virginia for Democratic challenger Jim Webb while a counting of canvass votes in Virginia was still underway. Halfway through the canvass, the count showed incumbent George Allen trailing Webb by about 7.200 votes, leading the AP to call the race in Webb’s favour.
Control of the US Senate has now officially become a nailbiter with CNN and Fox calling the Montana Senate race for Democrat Jon Tester, edging out Republican incumbent Conrad Burns by about 2800 votes with all but 1 precinct reporting.
What this effectively means is that control of the US Senate now rests on the Virginia Senate race between Republican incumbent George Allen and Democratic challenger Jim Webb. The last update had Allen trailing Webb by about 7800 votes with Allen likely to call for a recount.
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